Cubanet, Miriam Celaya, Havana, 30 September 2016 — This Friday, 30 September 2016, the fourth session of the Cuba-US Bilateral Commission is meeting in Washington, an occasion which the Cuban regime has selected to present their rejection of “endorsing programs that Washington is promoting without the consent or consultation by the official channels established for exchanges of this kind.”

This statement by Mr. Gustavo Machín, vice president of the Cuban Foreign Ministry in the United States, refers to the summer scholarship program that the non-governmental World Learning Organization grants young students around the world, although the official Press in Cuba and officials instructed in the case have been orchestrating in recent weeks in an all-out media spectacle aimed at convincing domestic public opinion that this is another grisly imperialist plan aimed only at encouraging young Cubans to subvert the political and social order within the country.

It would seem that the roughly 40 Cuban students who have had the opportunity to pass these summer courses in 2015 and 2016, respectively, constitute a real threat to the stability of a dictatorship that has survived for nearly 60 years in power. Or that the White House has concocted the bright idea of annually forging a handful of youth leaders who, after several weeks of classes in a free society, where they will exchange with other young people from the US and other countries, will be willing and prepared to end Castro’s revolution.

Such presumption suggests, on the one hand, the fallacy of the ideological solidity of the Cuban youth, so touted by the olive green regime; and on the other, that the political system has begun to suffer from a butterfly fragility in the heat of the exchange programs promoted by the US after the restoration of relations between the two governments.

The apotheosis of nonsense is the list of “subversive” practices acquired by students benefitting from World Learning summer course scholarships, shown on the organization’s website, citing verbatim the press monopoly scribes of the Castro regime: developing public speaking skills, teamwork, negotiation, consensus building, conflict resolution, defense of one’s rights and troubleshooting.

Only for a reality like that of Cuba could such a program be termed “subversive”. No leader with a modicum of decency – especially in our underdeveloped, poor countries with serious institutional problems – would be offended in the least by their country’s youth receiving this type of instruction and acquiring these skills that, according to the website, “help the next generation of world leaders to get a greater sense of civic responsibility, to establish relations across ethic, religious and national lines, and to develop skills and knowledge to transform their communities and their countries.”

But it is not difficult either to understand the alarm of the Druids of the Plaza of the Revolution, well-versed in subversions. Nothing is as dangerous to them as a “leader” who does not emerge from the “Ñico Lopez” Party High School where, nevertheless, dozens (or more) guerrilla leaders have been formed who have sown conflict, war and death in this region. Not a few leaders of the FARC and other leaders of the most corrupt Latin American radical left have passed through its classrooms and have received diplomas and awards from their mentors. Some have even attained the president’s chair in their own countries, with known disastrous results.

Young participants in World Learning programs (blogs.worldlearning.org)

And not to mention the indoctrination and systematic brainwashing of thousands of young people from the Third World who have studied Medicine and other specialties in Cuba over the last decades. The Castro regime, the most perversely “generous” dictatorship in recent history, has even extended its “charitable” mantle to lower-income American students, though it has not requested their government’s permission to do so.

And it is specifically at that point where the apex of insular authoritarianism reveals itself. Assuming that the US government and the NGO World Learning need to go through the prerequisite of requesting authorization from the Cuban government to provide summer scholarships for Cuban youth, they are placing the young people in an obvious position of slaves who need the benevolence of their masters (the State-Party-Castro Dictatorship) to access certain training. At the same time, the government places itself in the position of the feudal lord who turns down success opportunities for his serfs.

At the same time, they ignore once again the leading role that should belong to the young people’s parents and relatives, who would be best suitable to decide and support, or not, their children’s education, especially since the timing of such instruction – student’s vacation period – will not interfere with the school year set by the Cuban educational system.

Far from it, and to legitimize the “national outrage” of the colossal offense, the Cuban authorities have ordered middle school, pre-university and technical school students to engage in the traditional protests against the twisted imperialist maneuver leading them down the wrong path. The most histrionic teenagers have screamed their heads off chanting slogans and waving nationalistic signs, they have learned by heart the speeches they might have to utter before the news cameras and the world press, while their own government has yet to offer an alternative with a future.

I see these fresh faces, hear their voices repeating the thousand platitudes of several generations lost in the national shipwreck, and I cannot stop thinking about how this corrupt regime has sown duplicity in the spirit of the nation. I just hope, for the sake of these young people and of Cuba, that scholarships like these will become more prevalent, that our youth will be taught as free individuals and that they will be granted lofty dreams and strong wings so they can achieve them. By then, they will have forgotten the slogans and will provide ideas and actions to overcome the long Middle Ages of the Castros. Meanwhile, let more “subversive like this” scholarships come, until Cubans won’t have to leave their national borders to learn to lead the destiny of their own country.

Urban Slums Report: The Case of Havana, by Mario Coyula – 2003

Click on image to open report. The report contains an excellent guide to housing in Havana and its terminology, for example use of the term "barbecue" for a makeshift platform built to gain floorspace.

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